I’m a bit confused. Is it to win as many boards as possible or get the highest total score?
Which is better?
Obviously the second, since your total score is higher. I don’t think the winning condition here is unclear: the goal is to get the best position possible, by getting more points than as many opponents as possible.
I’m reading incorrectly, you said winning by 5 points not winning with a score of 5 points. In that case, still, aiming for the most points seems your best bet in any case to get the best position among the players.
It wasn’t my intention to make this a game with collaborating opponents either.
Sorry, that’s what I initially thought, but I was confused when you phrased it as
The winning condition is now clear: get the highest combined score among all of the players to win.
However, what if winning becomes impossible, what are the secondary objectives to play for??
It seems perfectly reasonable to avoid overt diplomacy and just ban discussion altogether. I was just saying that in a tongue in cheek manner. However, even without any communication beyond the nature of the moves of the players, in a multi-player arena, one might wish to consider the diplomatic implications of certain moves.
What is important perhaps: a player can only resign all games simultaneously, or of course not resign at all. There’s no resigning one board and continuing another.
If a player resigns, the game naturally moves from an n player game to an n-1 player game, with a 2 player game just being a regular game of Go (with perhaps some unorthodox moves).
Still: ending as best as possible. Sorry, but I don’t think I understand your confusion. When running a race against 2 other people, and you find out halfway that it’s impossible to beat the fastest of the three of you, then surely your secondary objective is to still be faster than the third?
Ok, this is a cool variant. I have a completely open board on the left side against le_4TC, but playing there feels like a mistake, since it would be in the middle of Kosh. It’s like there’s a shadow hanging over each these games.
The question from @yebellz is warranted, although perhaps a bit pedantic 
All the problems we had with defining goals in diplomatic go could come up here as well. For instance, should you care about your absolute score, or only about your placement? And if only about your placement, should you care about the ordering of the other players?
But, I think it’s easier to pretend like these issues don’t exist for this variant. I can just imagine that I’m playing two go games, instead of trying to win the whole game. The issues only arise once you start playing really seriously. Right now we’re just casually trying the variant out.
I was confused by the wording “winning as many boards with as much as you can”, since I thought you meant that it could be better to finish ahead on more boards.
I understand what you are saying about this, but I see that @le_4TC just explained my view for me. Yeah, it’s the same pedantic questions that we had about how to define objectives in Diplomatic Go.
Unlike a race, even if a player seems doomed to finish in a distant third, they might still have an opportunity (and wouldn’t necessarily be discouraged from doing so) to trip up one of their opponents to decide who wins.
So far I haven’t looked at the third game which I’m not part of… then I just had an “aha” moment where I realized I can tell exactly what it looks like only from my two boards 
What a flex… “I don’t even need to look since my visualization skills are so superior…”
Not if one of the other players plays a move that is invalid on one board. ie. has to pass on one board.
Not quite my intention 
It was more like “in theory I could construct it” than “I can see it in my head”.
Hmm, yes, I have to agree that it’s quite similar to the Diplomatic Go incentive problem, which I only realised just now through the realisation that attacking a player weakens them on both boards, since they have to respond, which gives their opponent the opportunity to take advantage…
Yep, I only meant “so far”! It will keep being true for a while, but eventually there will be “hidden” information in the third board.
One could solve the incentive problem by making it a game for an even number of players and two teams (where the players combine their scores): the team with the best score wins.
Here, territory scoring may be interesting, since that makes the shared boards between teammates a small burden: you want to play as little moves as possible on those boards.
As long as captures between teammates don’t count towards score, it will also solve the problem with ko fights being point generators.
I’ll call this Entangled Rengo.
Even ignoring the more complicated incentive issues (like grudges and retaliation) for now, just the three player nature of the game should at least give rise to a “king of the hill dynamic”, where the trailing two players are incentivized to attack the leader, but then once the leader is displaced, the attention shifts focus to the new leader.
Such a game might have a self-balancing dynamic, where nearly everyone maintains a realistic shot to win, even very late in to the game. However, it could also be possible that one player falls behind while the lead just winds up be traded back and forth between the other two. Yet, the trailing player might still be able to play the role of kingmaker, which might give them some leverage (even if only implicit and non-verbally expressed).
I’m heading off for tonight 
And done!
The results:
Kosh (28) v Vsotvep (37)
Kosh (37) v le_4TC (44)
le_4TC (39) v Vsotvep (42)
So in total: Kosh has 65 area, le_4TC has 83 area, Vsotvep has 95 area. And that’s without komi.
This was quite the experience, feels a lot like Go, more so than Thue-Morse or SAS, but there’s an extra dimension. You constantly have to weigh in what thing is better to sacrifice. There’s also a part where you can use an opportunity to attack one player at two points simultaneously, thus it seems to be extra dangerous to launch an attack, as the third player can make use of it.
It’s also fun to try and find a move that works well on both boards simultaneously.
I would love to play again, perhaps a 4 person Rengo variant
But first it’s time to get some sleep.
Just catching up with this this morning and again in absolute awe of the brain power of some forum dwellers!
I’m also curious about the resign mechanic. Suppose I misplayed on one board bad enough that it’s just worth resigning, like I filled in an eye or just missed a tesuji etc. Suppose it’s bad enough that my only group is dead like in a ladder or something but I think I can win on another board.
Do I just keep playing on the other board which ends up as bad moves/passes on the mistake board? Then if one game ends earlier, eg two consecutive passes, do you just play reduced entangled or normal go on the other boards depending on the number of games left?
Yes, all moves are mirrored on each board.
Two consecutive passes on one board does not end the game there: only if all players play a pass consecutively on all boards, does it become an actual game-ending pass.
There is in fact a problem with resigning, since the score cannot be decided on any unsettled boards. Presumably a player who resigned has a terrible position on one board, which gives their opponent a lot of points on that board. If the board were discounted altogether, this would obviously be a major setback to the opponent.
So I think that after all resigning should not be allowed.